


Fourth Down

by Aja



Category: Hart of Dixie
Genre: Angst, F/M, Infidelity, Interracial Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-19
Updated: 2017-12-19
Packaged: 2019-02-16 21:32:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13062564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aja/pseuds/Aja
Summary: Lemon has a wormhole in her brain.





	Fourth Down

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Pampermousse](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pampermousse/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, Pampermousse! I hope you enjoy this even though it's a little vague on the details, just like the start of their relationship. ;) Thanks to E for the beta.

She's twelve — it's the same fall her mom leaves them — when she sees Lavon Hayes play football for the first time.

Oh, she's seen him before, or rather she's been vaguely aware of him before, the way she's always known abstractly of the Bluebell boys in their sharp royal blue and white CLJJ High School uniforms. You can't live in Bluebell, after all, and not know that Lavon Hayes helped put Bluebell on the map. Can't live in Bluebell and not know that Lavon Hayes is gonna win a Heisman one day. Everybody knows that.

But then her daddy, who's probably desperate to take her mind off the endless wait for her mother to come home, does something totally unexpected. One fine October morning he bundles her up in a crimson scarf he got from who knows where and bustles her and Annabeth out the door bright and early to make the long trip up to Tuscaloosa. She watches the ground shift away from the loose gravel of the silt and sand along the Gulf Shore towards the thick limestone deposits further inland. She watches the trees grow thicker along the sides of the road, watches the palms give way to dark deciduous undergrowth. And at the end of that long highway is a sea of crisp white tents and a sea of people in red, the women all in heels and the girls all sporting identical sweeps of long blonde hair with identical dark roots.

She knows what a tailgate is, of course, she’s not a heathen, but she’s not quite sure how to conduct herself around the sophisticated murmurs of all these people in their fancy tents with their fancy gas grills and their neat linen tablecloths laid out beneath spreads that could make the local Bluebell potlucks weep for envy. She thinks of her mother, wherever she is, murmuring, “Straighten up, Lemon, shoulders back, chin up,” and she does. In these heels, she could pass for fourteen, maybe even fifteen, she’s thinking, and she and Annabeth are experimenting with ways of tossing their hair over their shoulders just so when the sea of crimson parts all along the tent row, a shimmering ripple, and the Crimson Tide football team appears out of nowhere and walks down the long knoll towards the tent where Lemon and her father and their hosts wait like some ancient kings on a dais. It all seems to happen in slow motion, like a strange festive gauntlet where hands reach out to touch and wave and backslap instead of to pull and tug and hurt. “That’s Lavon Hayes,” someone says, and suddenly “Lavon Hayes” is no longer the mythical figure of Bluebell legend, but a tall gladiator striding up to their tent, wide shoulders and an even wider smile, a smile that glances off things and people and sunlight and never falters, never looks fake. She watches, fascinated, wondering how he does it. That’s Lavon Hayes, future Heisman winner, whatever that is. Lavon Hayes — he helped put Bluebell on the map.

She’s twelve, and Lavon Hayes is twenty, and the following year he will break the hearts of Alabama fans and enter the draft, and in another three years he’ll have his first Super Bowl ring, and in twelve years, double her entire life span, he will cup Lemon’s face in his broad hands and she will feel a great terrible soul tremble, a kind of deep-down come-to-Jesus revival-style tremble, and she will lean in and pull closer to him, and he will kiss her like nothing she’s ever known —

But for now, all she registers is that Lavon Hayes is tall, and her father slaps him approvingly on the back a few times, and when he walks away with the rest of his teammates towards the field, her father says:

“Nice boy. Shame he’s from the wrong side of the tracks.”

  
  
  


He’s too old. He’s nearly _nine years_ older than she is. Even if he hadn’t spent ten years winning Super Bowls and becoming an international celebrity, for god’s sake, Lemon, those nine years would mean a significant disparity in sexual partners. Two! He won _two_ Super Bowls, Lemon, how many girls do you think each Super Bowl ring guaranteed him? Were they seasonal, or do they accrue over a lifetime? What if he’s still collecting interest?—

Stop this. Stop this immediately. He’s not George. He’s not George, he’s not your _fiancé_ to whom you are _engaged_ , the boy the whole town has been expecting you to marry since you were sixteen at least. He’s not the boy you bring home to your daddy — wrong side of the tracks, wrong side of the tracks, for _god’s sake, Lemon!_

“I’m the _mayor_ ,” he snaps at her, one night when she’s trying to make sense of the endless cyclical wormhole in her head. “I’m one of the town’s most respectable citizens, I’m the richest, most famous person you know, Joe Montana thinks I’m one of the best defensive strategists who’s ever played for Dallas, and if that’s not enough, I straight-up have a yard full of _crocodiles_ in my _antebellum plantation_ whose horrible history I have miraculously reclaimed for the one-point-five black people who live in this town.”

She blinks at him, wide-eyed, as though she has no idea what he’s going to say next. He says it anyway.

“What the hell more do I have to do in order to be good enough for you?”

“I don’t _know_ ,” she bursts out, because it’s true, it makes no sense. The only thing she knows is that her brain keeps ordering her to stop this, all of this, immediately, because it’s not right, none of this is right —

But that’s not right, either. Lemon Breeland. You are supposed to be better, so much better, than all of this. You’re not supposed to cheat on your fiancé and sleep with another man and then treat him like your dirty little secret like it’s the nineteen-fucking-fifties and you’re somewhere in between Tennessee Williams and one of those overwrought melodramas your momma liked to rent on VHS, the ones with the women in tragically windswept scarves and the sumptuous sad music and the aesthetic of oversaturated reds that made everything seem like death before she left you and left everything red and awful, and why, _why_ are you thinking about _colors_ when he’s looking at you like that? Lemon Breeland, why are you such a disaster?

“You don’t want me anyway,” she tries. “I will never, never in a million years deserve you,” and she means that with her whole heart. She hasn’t deserved him since that day he strode down that Tuscaloosa pathway like a modern gladiator only to have her father trail derision and mockery in his wake. They’re all tainted, her whole family is tainted, and maybe they _are_ some kind of tragic failing Southern Gothic stereotype. Maybe that’s what this whole town is, and Lavon is the only person too stubborn to admit it.

Blasphemy. That’s blasphemy, Lemon Breeland. You stop that right now. Stop all of it. Stop. _All of it_.

He sighs, draws a hand over his eyes. She thinks: This is it, Lemon Breeland, this right here. You will never be happier than you are right now, in this moment, and you can’t wait to throw it all away.

Like mother, like daughter.

  
  
  
  


“You’re not your mother,” he tells her on their wedding night, when she’s curled up against him, eyes closed and purring, soaking in the warmth of him as he runs his hands over her bare shoulders. She cracks one eye open at him.

“Where did that come from?” she says, trying to laugh it off.

Lavon tilts his head and just looks at her.  “You never were,” he says. She sits up and looks at him, stricken.

“I know,” he says, solid and reassuring as always. “I always knew.”

She was right back then, all those years ago, she realizes. She is _never_ going to deserve him.

“And you’re not going to leave me,” he says confidently. “You’re not going to run away, Lemon Breeland. I won’t let you.”

“Don’t let me,” she pleads, sinking against him, even as she suppresses that dark soul-rumble inside of her: the earthquake of longing and betrayal that will one day shatter her into pieces — or else leave something hardened and new in its aftermath.


End file.
